[OW] On the writing of a chronicle of the year 1145 a.d.

 When I was a young man (starting college or perhaps even still in high school), 

I wrote a short story -

inspired perhaps by my love of encyclopedic things, of learning of the Herculean undertaking of who Denis Diderot, an Enlightenment polymath who single-handedly put forth an Encyclopedia, and no doubt also influenced by the pre-eminence of the scriptorium The Name of the Rose

in which a man, perhaps a young man, but I imagined him as old,

sets about to perfect a Yahrbuch or almanac, a chronicle of a particular year. (1145 a.d. I believe - chosen perhaps because I could think of nothing of note happening in that year).

He is located in a remote and obscure monastery and purports to perfect this chronicle for the Emperor, as a gift.

The story focused on the trapping of scholarship in the medieval period, notably, the difficulty in getting paper and the use of particular tools, inks, brushes, etc.  Pumice stone, used to scrap the vellum clean, etc.

I did not go into the content of the work he was producing excessively much. It was to cover all of the fundamental and necessary knowledge included within a classical education. 

I extolled the acumen and probity of the work and the highest levels of erudition of the compiler directed toward all of the fields of endeavor and enterprise affordable within the medieval epoch. 

I was struck perhaps by some reading of English chronicles of the time which were organized in a slightly odd way.  In periods in which someone loquacious was recording, there may be lengthy passages about the more mundane or local events, but during other periods there may be extended periods in which the chronicle would simply read 1135 - No events of significance. 1136 - continued much the same as last year, 1137 - nothing worthy of note. The lack of communications between remote monasteries, I imagined to be a limitation on the ability to record or encounter significant events happening throughout the secular world.

As a young man, I envisioned this scribe/scholar's commitment to his work, an all-encompassing work of such magnitude that it absorbed every moment of his waking life.  He secluded himself in a tower with only books and his writing material. He transcribed, edited, drafted and redrafted the work - laboriously scraping his vellum clean to rewrite certain pages, again and again. 

While I was aware (even at that time) that a superior work would be the product of many minds working in concert, sharing efforts and specialties, I found the idea of a lone iconoclast searching out the perfection of thought as a solitary activity to be appealing (at least within the confines of the story).

Notably, somehow, this activity seemed to take place over a lifetime - a man's life work, his magnum opus, and yet I condensed it into a single year. I noted the passing of the months and seasons as the play of sunlight thorough his tower windows and the relative cold or warmth in his scriptorium.  But no outside influence was spoken of - although surely there were those brothers who attended his needs, brought his meals, filled his water jug, etc. Surely events took place outside even as he was engaged in the act of writing.  While he may have struggled with this, the obsolescence of his production even as he was producing it - he elected to strive for a timeless and therefore, always true, stance about the articles he labored to produce.

As winter once again approached and the days grew short and shadows long, he noted time and again that his eyesight was much diminished and his hands were cramped and gnarled from gripping his pen in the increasingly bitter cold in his room. Even as his body betrayed him and grew weaker, he pressed on with a fervent passion to complete the work before his end arrived. He spoke of a legacy attained and assuredly of the place he had made for himself in history. This gave him the strength to carry on.  With trembling hand he applied the finishing touches before slumping, finally lifeless, in his chair.  

This was the cliched ending I affixed to this melancholic tale.

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As a young man, I could vaingloriously imagine myself in the role of this solitary scholar - refining gold from the dross and detritus of history, stamping my name indelibly on the cover of the definitive work of scholastic erudition.

Yet, now as a much older man, I can see how it much have been written from a young man's perspective. Today I would write a different tale.  perhaps on in which try as he might, the scholar could never fix on a finished version of his work. He would become entangled in a never-ending process of recapitulation.  Or worse yet, would never find the inspiration to produce more than a few half-hearted scribblings, faint scratching, fragments and pieces, ideas for greater things that would never come to pass.  More likely, he would never be allowed to work on such a momentous project alone but would be only a nameless cog in a machine of historic production, reduced to a functionary rule, deprived of any autonomy or point of view at all - serving only to advance a received orthodoxy or dogma without any glimpse of change or advancement. Adding maudlin to melancholy, I could amend the ending to show that after attaining his achievement, the monastery burned down and no one ever saw it. That would still amount to a kind of glory, I suppose, albeit a tragic one.  More than likely, after finishing it, it would be sent to a repository or library archive, where it would lie ignored for centuries, before ending up as the binding material of phone books or pulped into paper for advertisement inserts in the Sunday newspapers.

There is a happier version of this story - one in which the actions of the single author stand in for the actions of narrative self-creation for everyone. The drafting and redrafting of the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, our times and our relations, are forever being rewritten, reinterpreted and recreated within us. The process of knowing and articulating all of the things we have read, seen, thought become the raw material of the soul, the fabrication of a self, a persona. The completion of the work and the ultimate failing of the body coincide necessarily with the attainment of the soul - a life's journey naturally ending in death. For what more is to be said, once the work is complete?